hey i installed here and im surprised, it fixed my w98 bugs and seem stable. anyone running this one out there?

I used to have ME. It was a nice OS as far as stability, and there were a couple features I was happy to see. But I really don't think it was worth the $90. It was more like Win98 Third Edition (or Win95 Fourth Edition). I would almost bet that even a couple Win98 Service Pack updates could have accomplished the same things as WinME.

Windows 2000 was the first major upgrade since '95, and I fully think it was worth it. It's memory and HD management seem so much better that the 9X kernel. XP will hopefully be worth it too. I've seen XP, and it's actually a decent OS, if you discount the preschool interface.

---Skorpion

i have w2000 here too, i didnt installed it 'cause they say its slower than wme.

plus i heard w2000 was a server os, thus more resource intensive. can i install all w9x software on w2000?...

edit: you mean that windows me is like a stable w9x version, then? it seems too, so far (here)
edit2: my programs are gone from the start menu, but they are still installed lol

[ May 02, 2001 12:02 AM: Message edited by: CopyCat ]

You sure ME is based off the 9x core?

And since when were there 4 editions of windows 95? I've got 95a, 95b, 95c, 98a and 98b.

Just a thought

This is what i got from another website www.emulators.com

Windows Millennium - the "no good reason to release it release". I honestly don't know why Microsoft bothered with this release. It's essentially Windows 98, minus an "Exit to DOS" feature. Most of the "new" features such as Internet Explorer 5.5, Media Player 7, etc. can easily be downloaded from Microsoft's web site. At a price of only $49.95 to $59.95, Microsoft must have realized that this was a useless Windows upgrade, as they priced it at almost half the price of Windows 95 and Windows 98 upgrades!

Now here is the major problem with Windows Millennium. In order to out SOMETHING on the box to say "hey, look, we added a new feature", Microsoft added this ridiculous "PC Health" feature to Millennium. Sounds sexy. Oooh, the operating system repairs itself. And when it screws up big time, you can "roll back" to an earlier installation. Sort of an "undo" feature in the OS, although, really, is this something you really want to advertise? Hey, our operating system is so unstable, we make it easy for you to go back to an earlier configuration!

Anyway, one of the things PC Health does as part of this System Restore feature is it constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, keeps backing up files. Since Windows Millennium was released a few weeks ago, we've received email after email after email from our customers saying that since upgrading to Millennium, their computers are running slower and their hard disk keeps thrasing.

The reason is very simple. Every file accessed, every documented opened, every file touched gets backed up to a hidden directory called C:_RESTORETEMP. This is fine if you are dealing with letters to grandma that are a few kilobytes in size, but what about large bitmaps? Large disk image files used by emulation software? Large downloads from the Internet? Yup, they get duplicated too.

In fact, we've easily been able to see that any computer we've upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows Millennium does in fact run slower and the hard disk is almost always on! I tried to disable the System Restore feature, by clicking on Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore, only to discover that System Restore can't be turned off there.

Worse, according to Microsoft's own documentation, (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/winmesr.htm) the System Restore feature will keep backing up files until your hard disk fills up! The System Restore feature shuts itself off once your hard disk has less than 200 megabytes of disk space. However even this is not enough. In once instance, while running SoftMac 2000 with a 600 megabyte disk image file, the system managed to completely fill up the C: drive, causing Windows to no longer be able to grow the swap file. As a result, SoftMac ran out of memory, the Windows desktop ran out of memory and could not refresh the desktop properly, and the whole machine crashed and burned. We needed to reboot, at which point there were only a few megabytes of space left on what hours earlier had been a mostly empty 6 gigabyte hard disk! System Restore had copied gigabytes of useless duplicate files (including many copies of the 600 meg Macintosh disk image) to the hidden directory.

How to shut this off? Well, this was the kicker. You can't simply delete the backed up files because the entire _RESTORE directory is marked as in use and thus can't be deleted. And since Microsoft removed the "Exit to DOS" feature, one can't just exit Windows to a DOS prompt like before. While there is an obscure "Disable System Restore" option buried away in the System control panel applet, interestingly enough under the "Performance - File System - Troubleshooting" tab, that still doesn't help with all the wasted hard disk space.

So here is my brute force solution to shut off and remove all traces of System Restore:

In Control Panels, Add/Remove Programs, create a Windows boot disk. It's really an MS-DOS boot disk.

Shut down Windows and reboot the PC from the floppy disk.

Go the C: prompt by typing C:

Type "C:WINDOWSCOMMANDDELTREE C:_RESTORE" to remove all the System Restore files.

Create a bogus file called _RESTORE by, for example, running EDIT and creating a blank text file.

Type "C:WINDOWSCOMMANDATTRIB +r +s +h _RESTORE" to hide this file. This will prevent Windows from re-creating its hidden directory.

Now reboot the PC and watch Windows Millennium run much faster!

On a machine that lacks a floppy disk drive, such as a notebook computer, you're pretty much hosed. We have such a machine, which we upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows Millennium via the network (the notebook itself has no floppy and no CD-ROM drive). After upgrading, the machine was thrashing like mad. Well, without the ability to exit into DOS mode (a simple feat under Windows 95 and Windows 98) the only thing I could do was unscrew the internal 2.5" hard disk, pop it into another notebook computer that had a floppy, do the above steps, then pop the drive back into the original machine. It took about 15 minutes but worked.

The whole System Restore feature is just an idiotic idea. Instead of wasting disk space and CPU cycles backing up files, Microsoft should expend more effort in merging Windows 9x with Windows NT and gaining reliability by means of the NT kernel. If you want to back your files or your entire hard disk, there are many excellent and inexpensive utilities out there to do that. Microsoft should stay out of the file backup business, and should especially not add features that eat up all of the PC's disk space and CPU cycles!

My advice - if you have a slow PC, run Windows 95 OSR2 or Windows 98 Second Edition on it. If you have a faster PC with at least 16 megabytes of memory, run Windows 98 Second Edition. If you have 64 megabytes and run at 200 MHz or faster, don't even bother with a consumer version of Windows. Upgrade yourself to Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 (a.k.a. NT 5.0) and enjoy all the benefits of a true 32-bit SMP-capable pre-emptive multi-tasking operating system. NT is to Windows 9x what Mac OS X will be to older versions of Mac OS - a solid, stable, powerful operating system. And unlike Mac OS X, it's been out since 1993!

You might want to read this link as well for Pentium 4 in-depth

http://www.emulators.com/pentium4.htm

Cal, yup, ME is 9X... that was one of it's drawbacks when used with several Stardock applications: about half of the really cool features didn't work because it didn't have the big fun API's to do it like 2000 did. And I was lumping the three 95 versions together, since Microsoft never really advertised them as separate products like it did with 98 and 98SE. I guess you're right, technically it would be 95 Sixth Edition. (Wow, that's pretty sad.....)

Aaron, wow, nice explanation. PCHealth was one of the first things I tore off my system when I ran ME. God bless "Features", huh?

---Skorpion

I am also running WinME and find it more stable than Win98. After installing WinME everything that was broken seemed to be fixed (except for my burner). As long you do a fresh install without the useless features, it runs solid (at least to me).

Since christmas I was running ME, I loved it to bits, its very stable, extremely fast and, in my opinion, extremely superior to Win98, I didn't miss real-DOS mode, i doubt many people did.


However, I am now running a dual-boot of Win98/Win2k Pro for reasons none othner than being a fool and formatting a hidden partition called DONT_FORMAT. That may seem nothign to you and me, but, it seems that the copy of WinME I got was locked in some way to that partition, I don't know why, you see, I bought the hard drive bundled with WinME as OEM Soft/Hard-ware to get it cheaper, but, I decided I paid for a 20Gig Hard Drive so I should get 20gigs, unlike the 18 I was getting because this hidden partition took up 2 gigs of space....

yes I know it was a long horrible story, and a complete waste of time...but, i am bored!!

One of my friends has this computer, and it all of a sudden created a partition called "system_restore" or something for no apparent reason. He didn't put it there, and it never used to be there. It just showed up one day, and he's never been able to get rid of it. It was weird...

---Skorpion

System Restore is part of the Windows ME new function. It's basically kind of like Norton Ghost but it sucks more. You can turn it off in msconfig OR in the System properties.

No wonder I only had 2GB of free space on a 15GB HD in a 4-month-old computer!!!

Although windows xp's System Restore is improved, i turned it off. I still cant find the system restore directory, as its not the same as Me.

Personally i found Windows Me more stable and faster, but somethings did not work with it the way that it should.

I liked Windows XP better and would be running it if it supported my remote for my sound card and my hp scanner.

Heh, I'd be running XP too, if Intel would get off it's lazy butt and acknowledge it's existence! The AnyPoint network system simply won't work on XP, unfortunately. Grr! So it's back to 2000 for me...

---Skorpion

I use Windows 98 on my personal computer that has all my fun games and webpage files on it, and it works great except for it's annoying tendency to decide to reboot itself ever few hours. On the computer we use to do billing for our small little company, I run NT, and it worked a whole lot better than 98 until it ate itself taking an entire years worth of invoices with it. Thank god for hard copies....we coulda been in some deep *&^%.

I downloaded an OEM ISO from Microsoft (I work with TV guide in the software development department so I have access to such things) and I tried it out. Basically is't Windows 98 with some added features. I like Windows 2000 much better.

Yup, same deal with me, PHA. (Well, sans the downloading the ISO part. ;))

---Skorpion

Hmmm am i only one who thinks winme was slower than win98?
Ok it is stable, but i did go back to win98FE and i really dont miss winme.

And about restore, i like to use ghost its much better

I found that WinME is one of the worset operating systems. Extremely un-stable .. and slow. Win9x is far more better. I ran WinME on these specifications:

• Pentium III 550 MHz
• 512 L2 Cache
• 12 GB Western Digital hard drive [ EIDE ]
• 128MB SDRAM - PC100
• Creative TNT2 Ultra video card

Windows 2000 is the best! Stabe ( but, of course not as *nix ) and easy to use.

Regards